The Customer Preview of Office 2013 Is Now Available

Microsoft finally revealed….no, not something new! How can you expect that Microsoft will invent something new? They have just revealed the “customer preview” of Office 2013.

I always wonder how many new versions of Office they will keep introducing. There are several free Office like applications such as, Google Drive and LibreOffice available online and don’t know why Microsoft expects us to spend hundreds of dollars to buy new version of Office after every 2-3 years. I am not saying that MS Office is not useful. Its great software and help Microsoft earn billions of dollars every year, but do you need to buy the latest version?

Let me highlight some of the features of MS Office 2013. Read them and then decide wisely.

• Its touch friendly. Finally, the software giant realized that the age of touch screens is here. Users can pinch zoom to view a document and type using their touch device’s keyboard. Wait a minute…don’t the Google Drive app offers the same feature?

• Have you heard about Yammer? I guess not. It’s a social media site for businesses and Microsoft agreed to buy it for $1.2 billion. Hence, the company decided that poor Office users should join Yammer. Buy Office 2013 and you will get Yammer and Skype by default.

• It will save your documents in Microsoft’s own SkyDrive by default, so that you can access it from anywhere. I think Drive users have already started laughing!

• Office 2013 comes with a new feature “Inkling”. It converts any handwritten content into text. Don’t they know other stylus driven tablets/smartphones are providing this facility for years?

• You can embed a video in word document and share it directly on Facebook. Good feature.

• Last, but not the least is Bing Maps. Bing Maps is going to be a part of Outlook. If you receive a mail that contains the sender’s address, click on it and you will be able to see that place on Maps. The same thing can be done in Drive. If you want to test, just open a doc that contains any address, select the address and press Ctrl+Alt+R.

So, what do you want to do? Microsoft will launch Office 2013 in the market later this year and pricing is not disclosed yet. If you want to try the “customer preview”, follow this link http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en